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Monday, June 26, 2006

Senator John Kerry delivered a strong speech about energy policy and global warming yesterday. Even if Kerry is merely ante-ing up on the issue (Al Gore's film, a speech by Hillary Clinton the week the film was released, but of course, no coincidence there), it is a terrific speech (text) and actual contains specific policy recommendations. Now, if only, a candidate can speak like this during an actual presidental election.

In the speech, Kerry mentions a "new" finding about temperature trends over the past 400 years. He is referring to the National Academy of Sciences report on the famous "hockey stick" graph, discussed below.

3 comments:

tim
said...

"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" -- Phil Jones in a reply to climate skeptic Warwick Hughes in February 2005 as confirmed and reported by climatologist Hans Vans Storch at a National Academy of Sciences hearing March 2 on "Scientific Efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records over the last 1,000 to 2,000 years."

I would like to call on all scientists who work on global climate change to open their data and methods to scientific and public scrutiny. It is a fact that during last 3 decades the global temperature has risen rather sharply. We need concrete scientific data not propaganda. It is important for survival of whole humanity on this planet. I understand Intellectual Property rights. But with humanity threatened, we need precise data to act on. No scientific hypothesis can be proven without peer review and withstanding scientific and public criticism. I hear a lot of screams about fear and fear mongering. I don’t see courageous people speaking facts in the face of adversity.

So, here again my intuition started to be supported by facts. Please read this link. Interesting that Al Gore is almost American Lysenko. The difference: Lysenko rotted people in jail. Al Gore cut their funding and destroyed reputations.

/www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcontributors/msheppard_20060630.html

As with anything you read please check the facts yourself. Don’t be gavnoedom.

I can't speak to your specific example. I suspect that the attacks on the "hockey stick" became so politicized that the authors could not trust how their data would be used.

The rest of your comment is just ridiculous. No scientific hypothesis is proven without peer review! Peer review is how science works. If you want to publish something, it has to be vetted by others in the community.

And if you want published climate data, it is no secret!! An example. I'm currently doing a study on the Caribbean and western Atlantic, similar to the region studied in those Atlantic Hurricane papers. The historical ocean temperature data I'm using can be downloaded from NOAA and the Hadley Center in the UK (same dataset used by the hurricane papers). The future projections from GFDL's latest climate models can be downloaded from their site.